Sohni Dharti Digital Competition

Sohni Dharti Digital Competition

IPPA partned with Epiphany, a social enterprise and impact consulting firm and organized climate conference titled “From Advocacy to Action: Sohni Dharti Digital Competition” on  6 November at Old Library Extension, Fatima Jinnah Women University for Sohni Dharti Climate Change Campaign.

Sohni Dharti is an awareness and community engagement campaign for environmental protection and climate action, which is supported by Australia Awards. It is imperative to mention here that Sohni Dharti Climate Change Campaign has not been just another campaign to raise “save the earth” slogans for some time only to die its natural death in a few months, rather it has been a deliberate and continuous effort to disseminate leading research on environment and climate change in Pakistan in order to allow its public consumption. For this purpose, we signed prestigious and leading names in climate change such as SDPI as our knowledge partners.

Furthermore, in order to take the awareness raised by the campaign one step ahead and transform it into deliberate citizen actions, a digital competition was also conducted. Citizens were asked to submit actions that could be in the form of municipal waste management, cleaning drives, tree plantations, water conservation, energy conservation, renewable energy solutions, video logs, blog posts, articles or other digital awareness campaigns and more. Applications were received from schools, colleges, universities and organizations to digitally present their action to mitigate risk and adapt to climate change. As a result of these efforts, 37 climate actions constituting more than 100 students, teachers and young professionals participated. Best videos on climate actions submitted by the participants were screened and final award distribution ceremony was held at the closing ceremony of the event.

The conference not only promoted culture of research, dialogue and innovative thinking to counter climate change in Pakistan, but also to acknowledged the efforts of young climateers, and involved maximum number of students and teachers in it.

These students are agents of change for tomorrow and therefore, we think, engaging them is extremely imperative in any drive.